Another Two Years Older
by EstellaB
Summary: Our characters can't help growing up in the end; non-chronological glimpses into their adolesence and adulthood.


**A little re-introduction to writing FF after over a year of absence. In-progress stories are being worked on, but I have learnt my lesson about life's unpredictability, and so I will try to finish them before I start reposting... Half present tense, half past; no chronology; just a set of observations, predominantly about John and Nancy. Don't own the characters :-(**

**Barbed**

Nancy is not invulnerable, and she glances down self-consciously at her thick, full figure as she is introduced to another officer, for the hundredth time, as a decent sailor "for a woman", or even "for a girl". She is not invulnerable, but she is irrepressible. Her handshake as she greets her new captain is strong and self-assured, and, as she settles her hat more firmly over her hair, she is very aware that she is changing the world, one ship at a time.

**Bulging**

The summer that Nancy wore beastlies and waged war on the Great Aunt, she was fighting another battle of a different kind; she did not want to let her childhood go, and it wasn't until she burst two buttons on her blouse that she eventually let her mother take her shopping.

**Perk**

One of the best things about John's job-in fact, the only formal part of his job that he liked-was going to the officers' ball and seeing Captain Ruth Blackett in her dress uniform. She hated it; he was not inclined to agree.

**Chalky**

He doesn't know what happened on her first mission as Captain, but when he sees her at the station, she is thin and white and weak, and not the same woman at all. Then she sees him and hollers, disregarding her lack of dignity, and perhaps she hasn't changed that much.

**Shadow**

Peggy Blackett was sixteen when she realised that she would never be her sister. The blow was crushing. Nancy's careless confidence, brave intelligence, and wild, ridiculous laughter ran through her head, and she was still scared of thunderstorms.

**Oak**

She flits from town to town, never settling anywhere for long, and never having a steady job; it is part of being an actress and a writer. There is something beautiful, though, in Tom's steadfast presence in Horning, something stable and reliable; his contentment rubs off on her so much that she half begins to contemplate moving there herself.

**Conservative**

There was something about the girls at university that didn't quite suit Tom; he was a man, admittedly, but their expensive, low-cut dresses and modern hemlines mostly made him think of a girl who wore her hair in two plaits at the age of eighteen, and then he was homesick.

**Unsolicited**

The first time Dot sees George Owden at a party in London, he greets her, one socialite to another, and shows no sign of recognition. Somewhere in her, a little London snob wonders how he was invited, but the part of her that is truly _Dot _remembers him stealing buttles' eggs, and, when he tries to dance with her (he doesn't take no for an answer), her glass of gin and orange accidentally finds itself all over his best jacket. She does not apologise.

**Shaky**

John knew perfectly well that he had sailed _Goblin _from England to Holland, and sailed her there in a lethal storm, no less; it didn't make things any easier when he first took the wheel of a naval ship. Even if his hands weren't trembling, his stomach was, and for the first time in his life, he felt seasick. Confused, he began to worry; had he not been born for this, after all? It seemed far more suited for Daddy than for him. And then the wind picked up, and the sails filled, and he began to sing _Rio¸ _and he wouldn't have chosen to be anywhere else.

**Untitled**

There is nothing more exciting for the young, idealistic writer than a blank exercise book, a fresh pen, and a cast of characters dancing in one's mind's eye. That is the attitude Dot Callum was in when Tom found her; she scarcely paid him any mind, sitting on the bank in the morning dew and gazing across the river. Unconcerned, used to Dot's meanderings, he sat down beside her and began to mend _Titmouse's _flag. They didn't even bother to talk until lunchtime, for even brooding artists have to eat. Tom went inside and made them both bacon sandwiches; that pragmatic gesture seemed to bring her back to earth somewhat, because she snapped her book shut and looked up at him with happy eyes. The gusto with which she tucked in suggested that she was not, quite, a sprite, and he found himself relieved by that observation.

**Leftist**

Titty had waded her way through Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and all the others; Dick was half-awed and half-horrified; when she protested against the capitalist education system, though, he went with her and bailed her out of prison at the end of the day.

**Cloudless**

It is thick and muggy and Titty is unhappy. Her big brother and her other captain are both military personnel now, and their annual summer adventures have been called to an end. It's strange and horrible to think that, just a year ago, she had sailed with them around Scotland, and Captain Nancy had devised plans to best the Pterodactyl; now, Petty Officer Blackett is the first woman in the Navy proper, and she is sparking outraged press releases everywhere. Titty sighs, and lifts her sticky curls off of her face; she is hot and bored and her book is finished, and she is impatient to grow up.


End file.
